The article, at New York Magazine, is by Rebecca Traister.
It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault. But contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its overradicalization but rather its underradicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.
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Jobless exploitation encounters about sums up sex with strangers. You should at least learn their name.
which is why so many morons are duped into thinking that since their sexual encounters were awkward/painful/drunken/> euphoric or liberating/otherwise negative, they must constitute rape.
Too easy.
What power imbalance?
The author wielded significant power -- at the start, when she said Yes.
Men get off a lot easier than women do -- that's biology, not sex. She's viewing the previous booze-soaked fling and thinking "How come I didn't feel better when this was happening".
It's not men's fault that you didn't feel better. If you have a partner who cares about you, and is interested in your experience, you'll enjoy it better. You're unlikely to find that at a boozy party on a college campus.
"Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it."
Lemme guess: written by a woman?
But seriously: you can't spend decades using up the moral capital accumulated over centuries and then complain you got nothing left. Apart from some chick at some point feeling bad and bitching about it, what grounds do you have left for deciding on badness in the first place?
Feminism is politics and, like all politics, is about power: who has it, who doesn't, and what it can be used for. Thus, feminists have focused on what can be criminalized (or pseudo-criminalisted, as with a college disciplinary procedure) over what can't.
Thus, the next step for feminism (beyond the current campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault) would be to explicitly criminalize bad-but-consensual sex, presumably by declaring "I consented BUT that was yesterday; today I regret it" as an actionable complaint, sufficient if upheld to result in punishment of the accused.
Either that, or declare that what college women want (as defined by what they do) is really not what they want at all; which is to say, to declare a war on women who don't behave.
So, can feminism declare a war on (some) women and still be feminist? Or is this an argument not just for "underradicalization" but for under-criminalization?
Women used to have all the power in sex outside of rape situations, but now they are constantly raped by feminism and by men who totally buy into a set of mores that, let's be honest, could have been designed by a set of particularly brilliant and abnormally horny teenage boys.
There is no third group of sexual encounters. If the sex and aftermath wasn't everything that you want it to be, then you didn't consent to bad sex or later heartbreak, so obviously it wasn't consensual. But fear not because by filing a complaint, you get to see that man suffer for not pleasing you in every way.
"Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it."
We need to roll up the Mason-Dixon line a let the States go their own way. People who think that this is an important topic that isnt being talked about can be off in their own little world.
Giving status to former WomenStudies/CreatingWritting/Sociology students to lecture to Society is not a sustainable model.
a vast expanse of bad sex
....then you're not doing it correctly.
I really wonder how much of the author's personal life is on display here.
I am not a woman, but I have to believe that if a guy mounts a girl, humps her for all he's worth, and then let's her sleep in the wet spot. That might be bad sex, and it's best to move on.
Good sex? As my father told me, "Ladies first!!".
Eh..some highlights before I could takes no more:
“I have so much to drink my memory becomes dark water, brief flashes when I flicker up for air,” Gattuso wrote. “I’m being kissed. There’s a boy, then another boy. I keep asking if I’m pretty. I keep saying yes.” But in the morning, she wrote, “I feel weird about what went down”
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It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex,...
<Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale law student and founder of anti-rape organization Know Your IX, tells me that she has heard from women who feel that “not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”
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Ok...clearly drinking can't be blamed here...time to address this through legislation.
In the meantime, with a few tweaks, there's
apps for that
Bad for who?
That article was sad. It was literally validating everything "Game" websites say. "We keep jumping on the disco sticks of men who treat us like unlovable meat holes. What's wrong with those men?"
And WTF is this bullsh*t? "Having humiliating sex with a man who treats you terribly at a frat party is bad but not inherently worse than being publicly shunned for having had sex with him, or being unable to obtain an abortion after getting pregnant by him, or being doomed to have disappointing sex with him for the next 50 years. But it’s still bad in ways that are worth talking about."
“not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”
She's right. They were promised the moon.
Who are these men anyways that she is writing about? I feel bad for her if that is the best she can do.
“I have so much to drink my memory becomes dark water, brief flashes when I flicker up for air,” Gattuso wrote. “I’m being kissed. There’s a boy, then another boy. I keep asking if I’m pretty. I keep saying yes.” But in the morning, she wrote, “I feel weird about what went down” and was unsure how to express her feelings of dissatisfaction and confusion over “such a fucked-up experience.”
Eventually, she realized that what she was grappling with was not just the night in question but also the failure of campus feminism to address those kinds of experiences.
Here's a hint young lady, thousands of years of civilization and eons of human cultural development have come up with some ways to address the situation.
It's OK to say no, for one.
"Meanwhile, male climax remains the accepted finish of hetero encounters; a woman’s orgasm is still the elusive, optional bonus round. Then there are the double standards ..."
Did she ever think to blame Darwin for this double standard? After all, conception is unlikely without male climax; thus, in Darwinian terms, female orgasm is optional. And never more so than in that shortest of short-term relationships, the hookup.
For that matter, whatever power men have in the hookup scene derives largely from women's greater choosiness. For what creates the men's negotiating power in this scene is that most women looking for a short-term partner won't consider any but the hottest men; thus, (these) men have the power to negotiate the terms.
The impression I get here is, the Red Queen is stamping her foot and insisting that biology should be as she wishes, not as it is. But hasn't that always been the case with progressive utopianism? For to truly address this power imbalance, colleges would have to increase the number of hot men on campus relative to the number of straight women (perhaps by affirmative action favoring men, or at least straight, hot men).
Consensual sex is a stupid term. Like saying "my wife and I played consensual tennis today."
leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.
Because the sluts have convinced them that sex is merely a physical act like shaking your hand, which it is most definitely not for women.
Evolution is a hard master, but it is the only master that could have made us.
Blogger Coupe said...
I'm very old fashioned, and any woman that wanted to have sex with me, was a complete turn-off.
Groucho Marx nods in sage agreement.
If she can't remember what happened, how does she know it was bad sex? She may have had the best ever. Damn.
Alternatively, if she drank, she was raped.
I have seen more than one woman write that in the old days, it was much easier to say no, because you weren't saying no to the person, you were following accepted mores. If you did say yes occasionally, a gentleman didn't talk. Now you are saying no to the specific person, whom you might actually like, but not in a way that you want to have sex with him, but you don't want to hurt his feelings either or end the relationship with him.
Feminism has created a game that denies evolutionary psychology (not the science, but the fact of it) and it remains to be seen whether it is solvable in a game theory sense.
Conservatism has solved that game, but not perfectly, so it must be thrown out, feminism has not solved it even imperfectly.
You know, perhaps the problem is that she is just terrible at fucking...
Kvetching is more satisfying than physical orgasm to certain women. For such as these, sex could be regarded as foreplay.
+1 robother
But I do like that blow jobs are so much easier to get than they were forty years ago. Thank you feminism!
"You know, perhaps the problem is that she is just terrible at fucking..."
As with all of writings of this ilk, fundamental possibilities like this not on the table.
But yes..it IS rigged..blame nature...or God or what have you.
If a man had a similar memory, he got drunk at a party and women were handing him around, kissing him, taking liberties with his body, etc, it would be one of his happier memories his whole life.
But not to worry, men are no different than women! Carry on with the war!
Pleasing a woman takes skill & time. Both partners have to be there "in the moment". Intoxicants, especially alcohol, don't help matters, but yet seem be there as a third partner in the event far too often.
I think what leads these women astray is the idea that having sex with this particular guy is somehow going to make up for the negatives going into it (e.g. intoxication, one or both participants being sexual klutzes). Sadly for women, that just ain't so. They end up thinking that somehow the game is rigged against them, when, actually, they just need to change their style of play.
Here..always a solution
"There are a few more female genital procedures, which are less common these are: Clitoropexy, which is where the position of the clitoris can be reduced and repositioned. The penultimate surgery is known as a Hoodectomy, which is where the fold of skin, which acts like a hood, covering the clitoris, is reduced in size as some can have this part of the vagina slightly larger than it should be. The final surgery is known as ‘G spot augmentation’, which is where collagen is injected into the g-spot area. This is not a surgical procedure and can help increase the sensitivity in the area and increase the chances of reaching orgasm during penetrative sex."
A new mission for Sandra Fluke...
Welcome to the Dodo Dynasty. Homo liberalis is an endangered species.
@Walter @3:13
Oh, God! Talk about surgeries where recovery time must be one hell of a painful ordeal.
There's basically no place on a body that has more nerves.
Solution to the stated problem lies in on-campus lesbianism, wherein both parties can complain that they were raped after the event if they aren't pleased with each others' performances, and both will be judged guilty of sexual assault by the university and banished to the real world beyond the ivory tower.
Feminists persist in supposing, that if they could just get the things that men have, they would be happy. I guess they must figure that, since we aren't constantly whining, we must be happy.
Another day, another round of clueless, dreary rambling on about sex from the world's unsexiest people.
I don't get your endless fascination with them. They're gross, stupid and boring.
Here's an idea:
If you want the person you are having sex with to show some interest in your happiness, don't choose to have sex with someone who has never shown any interest in your happiness.
But I do like that blow jobs are so much easier to get than they were forty years ago. Thank you feminism!
I'm married.
So, no, it is not.
It's a rumor, at best, at this point.
I think what leads these women astray is the idea that having sex with this particular guy is somehow going to make up for the negatives going into it (e.g. intoxication, one or both participants being sexual klutzes). Sadly for women, that just ain't so. They end up thinking that somehow the game is rigged against them, when, actually, they just need to change their style of play.
From my experiences, there is a subset of women who need an "excuse" for why they had sex. Alcohol works nicely for them. They also tend to like being dominated, I suppose, due to that making the sex "out of their control". A tinier subset get off on the rape fantasy thing (I could never fulfill whatever they wanted with that), also because --- to some small degree --- it makes it not their fault.
Feminists persist in supposing, that if they could just get the things that men have, they would be happy. I guess they must figure that, since we aren't constantly whining, we must be happy.
Honestly, never even thought of that, but I can see it makes sense.
People up & down the spectrum love to think they can define sex with their religion, education level, shock value agenda, etc. The best of humanity has tried to explain sex & failed. It's best to decide for yourself & protect yourself from busy bodies; unless, that is, you're a pedophile or an actual rapist. ;)
I'm pretty sure this explains what happened with Mattress Girl. She let the foreign exchange student (Paul something?) fuck her in the ass with the understanding that after that they would start dating. I don't know what he did or did not promise her, but apparently after he fucked her in the ass he decided he didn't need to date her after all.
So she is left with what must have been an unpleasant sexual encounter and she didn't even get what she wanted - the hot guy who promised he'd take her out to dinner and be her boyfriend ultimately treated her like nothing more than a "fuckbuddy". She gave up her ass to this guy and he won't even date her!? After months of fuming over this turn of events she decided it must have been a rape - because she never would have let a guy buttfuck her if he wasn't serious and clearly the foreign exchange student wasn't.
A legion of Alanis Morrisette fans plays this chain of events over in their heads and agrees that charging the foreign exchange student with rape sounds like justice.
So the message is that women don't know what they want, but they know they're unhappy and it's men's fault?
Boy, we could have saved a lot of time if they'd have just said that from the start.
I'm pretty sure this explains what happened with Mattress Girl. She let the foreign exchange student (Paul something?) fuck her in the ass with the understanding that after that they would start dating. I don't know what he did or did not promise her, but apparently after he fucked her in the ass he decided he didn't need to date her after all.
A girl who does anal really early in a relationship is normally not one you will be staying with long.
Most people, or whatever, maybe not the grey-sexuals, have consented to or engaged in sex they later regret for whatever reason.
It wasn't that great, guilt after infidelity, shame after giving away your self-esteem due to daddy issues...
It's like a roller coaster. Sometimes it just wasn't worth the wait in line.
Anyone who views sex as a power play is missing the point (and will likely always be disappointed.)
I think if more men looked like Cary Grant and more women looked like Marilyn Monroe, then there would be more great sex. You can fantasize about it, but you're not going to win any Grand Prix events in that Honda Civic you're tooling around in.......Men have great sex in their twenties even when it's not great sex. Women tend to have better sex in their thirties, or, at least , less regrettable sex.....Odom may recover from of in the Nevada brothel. If you want great sex, you have to take the risks and spend the money.
Jupiter @ 3:32 pm = brilliant!
Of course, even if men were constantly whining, women would never listen.
Nobody ever seems to talk about the "lamentations of the men."
People routinely have consensual meals in restaurants that are less than optimal. That's all less than wonderful sex is. Now if you are going to get blitzed and expect fantastic sex from Mr. Wonderful then you might be the kind of fool who expects a five star meal from low rent greasy-spoon dinner.
Reading between the lines, the article is also very telling of millennials--they want the rewards without the effort. In this case, they want great sex without any effort on their part. Why? Because.
Perhaps the sex they have is terrible precisely because they make no effort. The guy picks up on this and uses her to masturbate. Fact is, sex with someone who doesn't care is terrible.
In conjunction with this, the notion that all that matters for the man is orgasm is not just silly, but destructive to a healthy sex life. If all that mattered was orgasm, jerking off is so much easier and cheaper.
a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking
Actually the Church has been warning the world of this, especially women, since before the sexual revolution. But suggesting that there should be linkage between sex and love, that sex should be truly humanistic and not an exercise in the objectification of the human person, was and continues to be seen as backward and unenlightened.
Because bicycles and fish, obviously.
Just put up a sign at the entrance to the campus:
On this campus if a woman does not have great sex with you, you WILL be expelled and registered as a rapist.
That'll work.
I'm glad I came of age in the '80s. I never had a sexual encounter I regret, although I do regret not having all of the sexual encounters I could have had. Similarly, to my knowledge, no one ever regretted a sexual encounter with me, and no one ever turned down an opportunity for more.
What the hell is the matter with people today? Or what the hell is the matter with me?
But in the movies...
Did Garage say something unexpected today? "Consensual sex is a stupid term. Like saying 'my wife and I played consensual tennis today.'" I'm impressed.
But is sex with a professor to get an A great? I mean the student was fully satisfied.
Alternative idea:
If your vajay requires a complex ritual in order to orgasm, you might want to stay sober enough to teach it to your partner before having sex.
I'm going to say the same thing I did the last time we all had this conversation, which is that of course casual sex is crummy.
Making love with someone you--you know--love, with whom you've invested the time to develop deep trust and intimacy and have mutually learned how to cherish and please each other: result: fantastic sex.
I read the whole thing in a state that meandered from boredom to acute irritation in approximately two sentence steps and then catapulted into horror.
The only problem here is that a bunch of heterosexual women who want the traditional type of respectful, long-term relationships with men have propagandized themselves into not being able to admit what they want. Hell, they can't even admit they're heterosexual. That could be the first obstacle to happiness.
The solution is not to further browbeat men. The plaintiffs cooked this stew - they can either throw it out and start over, or they can eat it or like it. It is not a political problem - they should be publicly shamed for suggesting that it is.
They should learn to masturbate and be good friends to each other, and then maybe in a few years they'll be able to cope with The Problem Of Men, i.e., Finding Mine.
The fact that an academic culture has developed which can tolerate and encourage such abject nonsense is evidence of acute cultural sickness.
The feminist movement has become anti-feminine to an almost unbelievable degree. Feminism does not require and never did require enacting a common, but still exciting to men, porn flick scenario.
It's also valuable to understand how some people got stuck on the consent/nonconsent distinction when there are so many other issues to examine.
Yeah, like why chicks in bars always try to make their boobs look bigger than they really are. That's my pet peeve.
Ok, what to say on this one?
I guess it's that slutty regretful chicks are awesome.
Hey, I got my own problems.
Why is it women seem to find so hard to say "my sexual preference is to have sex with someone who love and respects me?"
And if your sexual preference is to have sex with someone who loves and respects you, you would be well advised to make sure of the love and respect before you start, because having sex will not make it so.
And yes, I think this is the key to Mattress Girl. Her thought process was, I did stuff I would happily consent to with someone who loves and respects me. When she discovered he didn't love and respect her, she retroactively withdrew her consent because had she known she wouldn't have consented under those conditions.
Not that this excuses any of it.
I don't hold out much hope that the people who've driven the change in our society leading to Traister-thought are going to do much honest reflection.
I suspect well-adjusted people will have to keep the ideologues/ridiculously confused/damaged people from solely defining the issue.
I see in the article that New York Magazine has a podcast on how we have sex now. I wonder if they point out how sex bonds couples. Married couples see that as one of the benefits. Along with children to raise, have fun with, and share the cycle of life and death with.
At least many of us her in flyover country see it that way.
What they want is the hot guys who can have sex with any woman they want and so have become contemptuous of women to treat them like the guys who potentially want a life mate.
Lefties never understand incentives.
In conjunction with this, the notion that all that matters for the man is orgasm is not just silly, but destructive to a healthy sex life. If all that mattered was orgasm, jerking off is so much easier and cheaper.
I've briefly dated women that I preferred not sleeping with over dealing with their nonsense.
I'd rather rent.
They're trying to use sex as a loss-leader, as a means of establishing a relationship.
In practice, they are taking a loss on each sale, and trying to make up for it in volume.
Never a good strategy.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
"Like saying "my wife and I played consensual tennis today."
Seeing as your wife left you, and that the amount of exercise from a game of tennis would probably give your lard ass a stroke, I doubt that is a phrase you would ever say, fat boy.
I'm guessing the problem is stupidity.
Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity.
David Foster Wallace's apt line in a review of John Updike comes to mind:
Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.
Seriously, exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation -- all of these things are code words for being a jerk and not caring about what other people think.
You are viewing your relationship with a specific person in terms of how it might look to a third person who subscribes to a lot of radical ideologies. It will never be as good as it looked in the brochure, because those ideologies aren't based on any kind of psychological realism.
” Feminists, she continued, “sometimes talk about ‘yes’ and ‘no’ like they’re uncomplicated … But ethical sex is hard. And it won’t stop being hard until we … minimize, as much as possible, power imbalances related to sex.”
She is mixing up ethics and judgement here. She wants emotional satisfaction, but she studiously does not want to apply a value judgement. She thinks the guys at the party were being creeps, but she didn't want to draw that line in the sand and take actions consistent with it.
She winds up feeling bad for not having done the work of telling her partners how to make her feel good.
Yes, because you are obviously so much better at finding happiness and sexual fulfillment than your parents.
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